Master Art

The present sheet is a fine and fresh example of a genre that Marco Ricci made his particular specialty. Indeed, the artist appears to have produced as many gouache landscapes, painted on kidskin (and, only occasionally, on paper), as he did larger-scale works in oil. These picturesque and brightly coloured landscapes were intended to be framed and displayed as small paintings. Aptly described by Michael Levey as ‘atmospherically subtle, small scenes of the north Italian countryside, invested with such a direct eye for nature that Corot might have envied it’, Ricci’s gouache landscapes often display distinct echoes of the countryside around the artist’s native hill town of Belluno, in the eastern Dolomites. Some 130 of these gouache landscapes are known today, almost a quarter of which are at Windsor Castle.

Another gouache landscape depicting a grain harvest, different in composition, is in a private collection in Italy, while a similar subject is also found in a gouache drawing formerly in a private collection in London.